�villagebottoms00017_mk.JPG Diallo walks past one a historic West Oakland property that he plans to turn into condos for black artist. West Oakland entrepreneur, Marcel Diallo,34, is racing against the gentrification clock to create an enclave of all things African-American in his neighborhood. He has a plan to create more black homeowners, black-owned cafes, galleries, boutiques and mom-and-pop shops. His vision is to call his West Oakland Neighborhood the Village Bottoms Cultural District. Mike Kepka / The Chronicle Marcel Diallo (cq) the source MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT

Photo: Mike Kepka

�villagebottoms00017_mk.JPG Diallo walks past one a historic West...

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�villagebottoms00291_mk.JPG with his son Diji Diallo, 5, in town, Marcel Diallo stands in front of a property he will be opening soon called "Soul Foods Coop." West Oakland entrepreneur, Marcel Diallo,34, is racing against the gentrification clock to create an enclave of all things African-American in his neighborhood. He has a plan to create more black homeowners, black-owned cafes, galleries, boutiques and mom-and-pop shops. His vision is to call his West Oakland Neighborhood the Village Bottoms Cultural District. Mike Kepka / The Chronicle Marcel Diallo (cq) the source MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT

Photo: Mike Kepka

�villagebottoms00291_mk.JPG with his son Diji Diallo, 5, in town,...

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�villagebottoms00128_mk.JPG West Oakland entrepreneur, Marcel Diallo,34, is racing against the gentrification clock to create an enclave of all things African-American in his neighborhood. He has a plan to create more black homeowners, black-owned cafes, galleries, boutiques and mom-and-pop shops. His vision is to call his West Oakland Neighborhood the Village Bottoms Cultural District. Mike Kepka / The Chronicle Marcel Diallo (cq) the source MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT

Photo: Mike Kepka

�villagebottoms00128_mk.JPG West Oakland entrepreneur, Marcel...

Against Gentrification / Marcel Diallo sees a black cultural district where Oakland's the Bottoms neighborhood now stands

Marcel Diallo is at war. It's a war he thinks he has about 18 months to win. As he walks the sidewalks of a neighborhood known as "the Bottoms" in West Oakland, he points out his enemies with a spoon, between dips into a pint of strawberry soy ice cream.

There are the punk rockers, who thought they'd found an industrial neighborhood where no one would mind their loud parties. There's "the Indian cat and his partner from Palo Alto," who got a deal on one of the neighborhood's many Victorians. There's the "speculator" -- a white guy in a white pickup -- who regularly cruises the streets to see what's for sale.

Diallo is racing against the gentrification clock to create an enclave of all things African American -- black homeowners, black-owned cafes, galleries, boutiques and mom-and-pop shops. He's even got a name for this vision -- the Village Bottoms Cultural District.

"The Chinese got Chinatown, the Latinos got the Fruitvale and the Mission. We want our equivalent," said Diallo. "The only way that black people are going to be all right and not on the brink of revolution and wanting to burn this s -- down is if we have our own place that we feel like is ours," he said.

It's not just for blacks, said Diallo. "Everybody needs a black cultural district. Just like everybody needs a Chinatown."

In the past few years Diallo has gone from an always-broke poet and musician to the majority owner of homes and lots along Pine Street -- the heart of the envisioned cultural district. He's transformed the group of eclectic black artists he hangs out with into a collective that is slowly moving into the neighborhood. About 15 of these 30ish artsy African Americans have bought houses. They and Diallo recently opened the Black New World -- a performance venue -- and the Cornelia Bell Gallery. A Soul Food Co-op, Modupe's Afro-soul and Vegetarian Restaurant and the Ghetto Flowers Boutique will soon follow. They're buying homes and starting businesses by pooling their resources and stretching financially. They also help each other with construction, painting -- it's an urban barn raising of sorts.

They're working with -- not against -- a man who would seem to be their arch-enemy: developer Rick Holliday, whose Central Station Development will bring up to 1,500 new residences to the neighborhood. To Diallo, the new neighbors will bring shoppers and patrons for the envisioned cultural district.

They hope to create a place like Harlem in the 1920s and '30s, said Eesuu Orundide, a painter and sculptor who recently moved to the Bottoms.

Is this a utopian vision? Yes. What form will it ultimately take? Hard to say. To some, Diallo's a visionary. To others, he's a racist and all talk. But the collective has momentum. And its members are moving forward in their own self-help, grass-roots way, with little help from community organizations, city government or foundations. Their approach is low on precaution and high on a belief in the power of art to transform people and places.

"The edge that artist types have on the average Joe is that they're more open to believing in magic," said Diallo. "Only an artist could look at a scrap yard and see a future cultural district."

The Glory Days

The formal name of neighborhood around Pine Street is Prescott. But it's known in the black community as the Bottoms. It's surrounded by the West Oakland BART station to the south, the frontage road to Interstate 880 to the west, Mandela Parkway to the east and 16th Street to the north. It has a beachfront feel because it's so close to the bay; a nonstop breeze washes over the old Victorians that dot the neighborhood. Drive through the Bottoms day or night, and you'll see people sitting on their porches and congregating on the sidewalks. The main businesses seem to be corner liquor and convenience stores. About 30 percent of the housing in West Oakland is subsidized. The predominately black community has a median income of about $25,000.

It wasn't always this way, said Marcus Johnson, a 40-year resident of the area. He remembers when nearby Seventh Street was hopping with social clubs and music venues such as Forty-Niners, where his aunt tended bar. You could get Texas barbecue or Louisiana catfish at black-owned businesses. His sister often babysat for the kids of Sly and the Family Stone when they played at Esther's Orbit Room or the Continental Club. Oakland bands such as the Whispers and the Ballads played there too.

Johnson's favorite time of the week was Saturday night at 11, when his grandmother would send him out on his bike to Seventh Street to track down his sister, who always missed her curfew. The streets were bustling with African Americans who worked in the nearby naval shipyards, rail yards and other manufacturing plants.

Diallo remembers, too. He rifles through a shoe box full of tattered photographs of his "party girl aunties" getting ready to go out for an evening on Seventh Street. In one, they have on go-go boots and hot pants.

The good times didn't last. The jobs that had fueled the local black middle class dried up. The West Oakland BART station, built in 1971, ran right through Seventh Street. Several business owners had their properties seized by eminent domain. The rest soon left. Middle-class African Americans that could leave, did. More fled when the crack cocaine and violence later hit the neighborhood.

Since 2000, Oakland has lost between 18,000 to 34,800 African Americans. Whites now slightly outnumber blacks in the city for the first time, based on estimates from the U.S. Census. The exodus is fueled by rising crime and home prices.

"All I want is for the neighborhood to go back to how it was when I was growing up," said Diallo.

A Coalescing of Resources

In front of 924 Pine St. -- described by members of the collective as "the Office" -- there's a small wooden sign attached to a rusty metal spear that says "Nganga Diallo's House of Common Sense." Although Diallo has been called a poet, artist, community activist and the unofficial Mayor of West Oakland, he prefers "Nganga." It's Congolese for "Magic Maker," he said.

The quickest way to get your mind around his vision for the Village Bottoms Cultural District is to walk one block up to the corner of 10th Street. Orundide and two other artists -- Githinji Wa Mbire and Keba Konte -- spent a few months painting a mural on the 10-foot high corrugated tin fence that surrounds a former scrap yard on the first lot Diallo bought. They imagined the colorful storefronts they hope will soon line Pine Street. All are bustling with black patrons in traditional African garb who shop for tomatoes, sip wine at the cafe and flip through magazines.

This vision began to form when Diallo returned to Richmond after finishing his bachelor's degree. in philosophy at Cal Poly in 1995. "I started out majoring in business, but it was way too bland," said Diallo, who was the first in his family to go to college. (One brother is in prison. Another was "shot in the head" while pushing his newborn son down the street in a stroller.)

Diallo frequented the poetry readings that were just starting in coffee houses throughout Oakland. "This was pre-slam," he explained. People would get up and do rehearsed riffs. "Then Marcel would get up there and take it to the level of church," said Letitia Ntofon, his partner. "He'd testify."

Diallo and others decided they needed their own venue. In 1998, they opened the Black Dot Cafe on East 14th Street in the San Antonio neighborhood of Oakland. It barely fit a small stage, a few tables, a piano and some couches. "But we would regularly cram 60 people in there," remembers Kele Nitoto, a percussionist who lived in a loft in the back. They had weekly poetry nights, plays, jam sessions and cooking and drawing workshops for neighborhood kids. Every Sunday afternoon they'd hold "congregations." "It was basically dancing like crazy outside and we'd cook up waffles inside," said Nitoto.

Two years later, they were evicted, said Diallo. Their landlord would have sold them the building for $20,000 but they couldn't pull the funds together. They lost their lease and had to move five times over the next five years, according to Diallo.

Diallo and his friends were fed up. "We decided we had to own something," said Diallo. "Anything."

Diallo, Ntofon and their friend Tiffany Golden went to an Alameda County auction of tax-defaulted properties in 2000. Diallo scraped together a few thousand dollars from his performances; Ntofon and Golden threw in some money, too. Together they had $7,800.

They bid on the only thing they afford -- an abandoned corner lot on Pine and 10th streets. Bidding started at $2,500. "I went head to head with a white guy" said Diallo. "Everyone in the place knew he probably had more money then me. But I 'vibed' him and stared him down." The other bidder backed out and Diallo and his friends got the property for $7,500. The whole place started cheering, said Diallo.

The lot was covered with junk that reached 8 feet high in some places. Rusted-out cars and tires were everywhere. The former owner, an old man named Jenkins, had long since abandoned it. Diallo brought his grandmother to see the lot. She leaned down and picked up an old address book. The first entry, she said, was an address and phone number for Laura Agnew, her mother. "It was meant to be that you own this," she said.

Then came a big break. His great-aunt sold him her North Richmond home that was about to be condemned by the city, asking just $1,000. Diallo and Nitoto tore the house down by hand. Diallo was unsure what to do with the lot for a few years until he went to Nigeria to visit Ntofon's parents. He said his great-grandfather appeared to him there in a dream, telling him to sell the house and use the money to "save" the Bottoms in West Oakland. Diallo listed the lot for $80,000 on Craigslist and sold it for $85,000

Around the same time, Diallo read in the newspaper that Holliday had bought 30 acres adjacent to Pine Street. "I called him up and said 'Yo Rick, this is Marcel. What are you doing in my neighborhood?' " The call began a six-year dialogue between the two men. Diallo wants African Americans to have the first crack at buying the lofts. Holliday agreed to work with Diallo to identify African Americans who can be "founding buyers" and buy at a discount. They're talking about co-developing some retail spaces along Pine Street.

Holliday said he advised Diallo to buy whatever he could in the surrounding neighborhood for the cultural district, and that prices were only going to go up. Diallo used his $80,000 to start buying and selling properties -- with the goal of accumulating land for the cultural district and helping his friends buy houses.

Diallo first started going down to the Alameda County office building and researching other vacant lots in the neighborhood. He'd identify the owners and track them down. He bought one lot for $3,000 and another for $5,000.

He knocked on doors all around the neighborhood and asked people to give him the right of first refusal to buy their house, if and when they decided to sell. He'd try to persuade them "not to be so greedy" and sell it to him for $25,000 or $50,000 less than market value to help "the cause." His charm and people's fear of his quick tongue served him well.

Records show that Diallo owns three lots along Pine Street, the warehouse that he converted into the Black New World, and three other homes. He says that he collaborated with others to buy or gain control of up to 10 more. "Now we own the whole neighborhood," he says on the Black Dot Cafe Web site.

Until recently, Diallo believed he only had a limited window to buy as prices escalated, and that meant taking risks. He has used a lot of sub-prime and interest-only loans, and was able to refinance out of some of them. He has sold other properties that appreciated. Right now, home prices in the neighborhood have flattened out and Diallo has slowed down his real estate activity. Holliday said he cautioned Diallo not to over-extend himself.

Once the collective members saw that Diallo could buy, they thought that they could, too. Orundide teamed up with another family to buy a home together. "We see Asian folks doing it all the time," he said. "Why not us?" They bought a five-bedroom home on 11th Street for around $500,000. His 5-year-old twins have a playmate in the other couple's 4-year-old son.

Nitoto and his fiancee Raheemah Muhammad bought a four-bedroom fixer-upper on 14th Street for $515,000. "We couldn't afford it at first," said Muhammad. Diallo advised them to buy the house and the money would come, she said. They quickly found a young family to rent out the downstairs and a poet friend to rent a room in their upstairs flat. Muhammad got a raise at her biotech job and Nitoto took a job as a security guard at Pier 39. Nitoto spent three weeks cleaning it and Muhammad was still disgusted when she first walked in the door. Now it's a sunny upper flat with hardwood floors. The front room has a piano they got for free and several shelves packed with the fantasy books they both enjoy.

"We're still poor but we have the house," said Muhammad.

Living and Being Real

Experts disagree as to whether or not the families and Diallo are doing the right thing to stretch and buy properties.

"I see them as having more control and more choices," said anti-poverty activist Maurice Lim Miller, who got to know some collective members through his nonprofit, the Family Independence Initiative. "They didn't have a lot to begin with so they don't have a lot to lose."

It all depends on the financing, said George McCarthy, a program officer at the Ford Foundation who funds programs to broaden home ownership in the United States. With adjustable-rate mortgages, if interest rates go up, the loans can be a "ticking time bomb" for borrowers who suddenly face increased monthly payments they can't afford, he said. The buyers in the Bottoms should be OK, said McCarthy, since their property values will likely go up when the Central Station Development comes in.

For now, the buyers are enjoying the neighborhood, holding backyard barbecues and going to events at the Black New World. Black nationalist poet Amiri Baraka recently drew 150 people there. Golden, a writer, read from her screenplay "First Born" another Saturday night. (A calendar of events is available at www.blacknewworld.com.)

Nitoto often sits in front of his house and holds impromptu drumming classes for neighborhood kids. The dealer who hangs out on the corner even joined in, said Nitoto. "You could see people driving by all slacked jawed, saying, 'That's the guy I get my stuff from,' " Nitoto laughed. "He was drumming and all hippied out."

Orundide tells a similar story. When he painted in his temporary studio space at 10th and Wood -- two houses down from the home where Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums grew up -- he thought he'd be "an undercover artist." But kids kept coming in and he'd give them a small painting. "They'd come back and ask "Can I get one for my brother?' " said Orundide. A few kids now bring their paintings to Orundide.

"These are my kids," said Muhammad of the neighborhood children. "I'm not going to leave them here to the drug dealers and pimps. They don't need people to come in here and be all goody-goody to them and then leave at the end of the day. They need people to come here to live and be real."

"We have so many youngsters who don't see themselves in a good light," said Nancy Nadel, who represents West Oakland on the City Council and is supportive of Diallo and his vision to create a black cultural district. "This can only be a positive thing."

Lisa Servon, a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, says it also makes economic sense for cities to promote "culturally authentic economic development."

"Cities are starting to look like suburbs," said Servon. "If they want to remain competitive, they need to lift up what's already there and differentiate themselves." City governments can do a lot to support these cultural districts, said Servon. They can implement zoning restrictions that keep big-box retailers out and indigenous businesses in, and provide special financing and supports for first time entrepreneurs and home buyers.

The next year will be a busy time for Diallo and the collective. A few of the businesses are ready to go. Others still need financing and space. All will need significant foot traffic that isn't there right now. In December, the collective started "Frist Fridays," where the first Friday of each month the Black New World, Nganga Diallo's, and the Cornelia Bell Gallery will be open Friday evenings.

Diallo will need institutional investors and technical development expertise, according to Carol Galante, president and CEO of the nonprofit BRIDGE Housing, which is developing 100 affordable rental units in the Central Station development.

But even when Diallo starts to go mainstream, he'll still rely on "juju" -- his word for magic. Visitors to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts "Sampling Oakland" exhibit last fall may have seen the collective's joint installation, called "A Shrine to the Anti-Gentrification Gods of West Oakland. May They Protect Us From the Invaders." The collective members gathered dishes, nails, records, broken glass -- anything they could find in the Bottoms' streets and vacant lots -- and glued them to 6-foot-high wooden letters that spelled out "OAKLAND." Visitors could dial a number and hear a pre-recorded message from Diallo:

If you are residing in a gentrifying neighborhood and or can be considered a gentrifying force, beware. The spirits of the anti-gentrification gods bottled up in the text of this shrine may be unleashed upon you. If I was you, I would leave an offering.

If you are a longtime resident in a gentrifying neighborhood, this shrine if for your protection. Leave an offering and be blessed.